Pamela Clare on Romance Fiction: Self in Society #11

Pamela Clare is a gun-toting Rush fan—and Boulder Progressive Democrat—who writes romantic fiction. She almost died in a mountain fall and had to be helicoptered out. She got death threats while working as an investigative journalist and had to tell one gun-waving disgruntled reader to get the f*** out of her office. She put her degree in classics to use in her historical romance novels before going on to write about rangers, firefighters, rock climbers, journalists, and other spirited characters.
Pamela and I sat down to discuss her writing, the genre, problems within Romance Writers of America, the business side of fiction, her experiences as a journalist, the allure of Colorado's wilderness, her views on firearms, and the music that inspires her.
Pamela says, "As I got older, I really came to appreciate the feminist nature of these stories. That word 'feminist' comes with a lot of baggage these days, but what I mean by that is the self-realization of the heroines in these stories. These heroines find what they're looking for in life, and they insist on it. These books focus on . . . heroines fighting for what they want with their lives. . . . As a woman I can identify very much with that fight, with the desire to succeed as a mother, to have a career, and to be respected by the people in one's life."

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